Disabilities protections fall short despite '90 law

SAN FRANCISCO - Jim deJong remembers when his buddies took him bowling when he got out of a rehabilitation hospital after an accident had left him paralyzed from the waist down 34 years ago.

SAN FRANCISCO - Jim deJong remembers when his buddies took him bowling when he got out of a rehabilitation hospital after an accident had left him paralyzed from the waist down 34 years ago.

His friends tried to lift him onto the lane area, but the business owner said he didn't have the necessary insurance and turned them away, said de Jong, a wheelchair user since 1976.

The incident happened more than a dozen years before President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, a landmark law that aimed to give disabled people equal access to employment, transportation, government services and public accommodations.

"Now I go to bowling alleys and you can roll out onto them - not all the lanes, but a couple of them," deJong said. "That's cool for kids to be able to do that with their friends."

Since its passage in 1990, the ADA has greatly improved the physical environment for people with disabilities, he said.

"You have kids coming out expecting accessibility now," deJong said. "They didn't go through years questioning whether they could get on a bus or not."

As the law marks its 20th year, experts and advocates hail its successes, many of them visible - things such as handicapped parking, restroom access, entrances to buildings that are wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs, and sidewalks indented with curb ramps and detectable warnings for the visually impaired. Even ordinary crosswalks at intersections come courtesy of the ADA.

"The ADA was one of the first laws, internationally speaking, that provided civil rights for people with disabilities," said Pratik Patel, president of New York consulting firm EZFire and a director on the board of the Society for Disability Studies. "It started the ball rolling, and laws in many other countries, like the U.K., are based on the ADA."

The law has performed best in improving physical access to public facilities, said Larry Paradis, executive director of Disability Rights Advocates, a nonprofit law firm in Berkeley, Calif.

"In the area of technology, it's starting to make a big impact - things like access to the Internet for people who are blind," he said.

But employment appears to be where the law has fallen short. "People with disabilities still are disproportionately unemployed and underemployed," Paradis said. "That's the biggest challenge in terms of making a difference after 20 years."

Only a third of working-age people with disabilities were in the work force in June compared with nearly 78percent of people without disabilities, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Being in the work force means they either had a job or were looking for one.

In June, 19percent of people with a disability were employed, compared with 64percent of people without a disability.

In July, President Barack Obama issued an executive order to increase the number of people with disabilities employed by the federal government. Only 5percent of 2.5million federal workers have disabilities, Obama said. Across the U.S., an estimated 54million Americans are living with a disability.

It's critical for employers to comply with the spirit as well as the letter of the law, said Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, which represents nearly 300 large employers.

"To maintain our standard of living, we really have to have every human in the country highly productive," she said. "It's in our selfish interests to make that happen. That's what a lot of the Americans with Disabilities Act is about."